Comparing a Hot Stamper of Rumours to an Original and the Nautilus LP

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

This letter from quite a few years ago comes from our erstwhile customer Roger, who was blown away by a Hot Stamper pressing of Rumours. Roger did his usual thorough shootout of the Hot Stamper against his own pressings. For the results, read on.

Hi Tom,

Just a quick note on the Fleetwood Mac Rumors Hot Stamper I just bought. I have a Nautilus pressing and my original pressing I bought in college when it came out. I have never liked this record as much as Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac, perhaps partly because its sonics were somewhat inferior.

So I played the Nautilus and quickly remembered what a piece of sonic detritus this thing is. How can audiophile labels like Nautilus put out something that is as thin, bright, flat, and compressed as this thing is? It obviously reinforces your point that most audiophiles are lemmings when it comes to audiophile records. If some audiophile guru said the Japanese pressing of Girl Scout Troup #657 singing the Girl Scout Theme Song was sonic nirvana, it would show up on every internet record website for $50 each.

Next up was my original pressing with an F16 matrix on side one, and man, what a relief after following the Nautilus disaster. In fact, I resisted buying a pricey hot stamper because I always felt my pressing to be pretty darned good, which it was. So I was shocked to hear just how much better the hot stamper was.

I played Dreams on side one and it took all of about 5 seconds of hearing the massive bass and startlingly dynamic cymbal crashes on this track to find the hot stamper worth every penny I paid for it. If the drum kit on Oh Daddy doesn’t get your pants flapping, time for a new stereo. Voices were eerily present, guitars had great detail, pianos had weight just like in real life (we have a piano in our house), and best of all, the highs were arrayed in space and were delicate and detailed.

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Holst / The Planets / Mehta

More of the Music of Holst

  • You’ll find INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this early London pressing of Holst’s phenomenal magnum opus
  • These sides are clear, full-bodied and present, with plenty of space around the players, the unmistakable sonic hallmark of the properly mastered, properly pressed vintage analog LP
  • Vibrant orchestrations, top quality sound and scratch-free surfaces combine for an astounding listening experience of this TAS-approved recording

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Franck – Symphony in D Minor / Paray

More Mercury Classical Recordings

  • Frack’s Symphony in D Minor appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with lush, textured and powerful Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this Maroon Label Mercury Stereo pressing
  • The orchestra is big, rich and tubey, yet the dynamics and transparency are first rate
  • The first copy we got hold of was a good — our notes read: “Rich and full brass and strings”
  • I regret to say that unfortunately that puts this particular recording in the minority when it comes to Mercury’s 60s releases
  • This is the best sounding recording of the work that we know of, and the first recording of the Franck to hit the site in more than a decade
  • Some old record collectors (like me) say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be – here’s all the proof anyone with two working ears and top quality audiophile equipment would need to make the case

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Count Basie & Oscar Peterson – Yessir, That’s My Baby

More of the Music of Count Basie

More of the Music of Oscar Peterson


  • Superb sound for this wonderful Basie/Peterson record pressed on fairly quiet Pablo vinyl, with Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • This copy is bigger, clearer and more full-bodied than most of what we played (particularly on side two) – man, this is the glorious sound of analog
  • “The two pianists (backed by bassist John Heard and drummer Louis Bellson) play five standards and three blues with predictable swing, finding much more in common with each other than one might have originally suspected.”

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To Find Better Records, Make More Mistakes

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Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Records with Audiophile Quality Sound

UPDATE 2026

We would no longer agree with the following statement:

“…most of the received wisdom handed down to record lovers of all kinds is more likely to be wrong than right.”

We recently wrote about the subject in a commentary about  conventional wisdom. There we simply point out that most of the time the conventional wisdom is right, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Audiophiles should be asking themselves the question: How would I even know whether it’s right or not?

Believing something about records because everybody else believes it is not a good approach to finding better sounding records. It’s really not a good approach to records, audio or practically anything else you care to name.

Experimental evidence trumps the advice of the reviewers, the forum posters, the youtube “cognoscenti” (scare quotes very much called for), and especially the kind of theoretical speculation audiophiles engage in as to the qualities of master tapes that few if any have ever heard.

We do things differently around here. (more…)

The Most Serious Fault of the Typical Half-Speed Mastered LP?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary must be fairly old because we haven’t bothered to play anything put out by Sundazed in longer than I can remember.

The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.

It’s dead-as-a-doornail sound, plain and simple.

And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the 70s. The average Sundazed record I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? (Apparently the guy who wrote this absurd list of records you should buy It has a number of inexcusably at best mediocre and mostly awful sounding Sundazed records.)

But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it.

So how does the famous MoFi pressing of Revolver sound? In a word, clean. Also not as crude as the average British import, and far better than any Japanese or domestic pressing we heard.

But it’s dead, man. It’s just so dead.

The current record holder for Most Compressed Mobile Fidelity Record of All Time? This shockingly bad sounding release, a record I admit to owning and liking back in the 80s. I had a lot of very expensive equipment back then, but it sure wasn’t helping me recognize how bad some of my records were.

How many audiophiles are where I used to be? Based on what I read on audiophile forums, and the kinds of audiophile pressings I see discussed on youtube videos, it seems that most of them are.

In practically every Hot Stamper listing on the site you will find some standard boilerplate that looks very much like what you see below. These are the qualities we want our records to have. I cannot begin to understand what audiophiles are listening for on these new reissues. Most of them do practically nothing well.

This is not AI-generated. This is copy and paste.

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More of the Same Heavy Vinyl Trash from Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix is just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?

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Isaac Hayes – Shaft

More Soul, Blues, and R&B

  • Seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them bring Hayes’s 2-LP soundtrack album to life on these vintage pressings
  • It took us close to two years to find enough copies with good sound and decent vinyl to do a shootout, and these outstanding pressings are the result of all that digging, cleaning and evaluating
  • There are some bad marks (as is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs) on “Cafe Regio’s,” but once you hear just how superb sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Isaac Hayes was undoubtedly one of the era’s most accomplished soul artists, having helped elevate Stax to its esteemed status… And with ‘Theme from Shaft,’ he delivered an anthem just as ambitious and revered as the film itself, a song that has only grown more treasured over the years, after having been an enormously popular hit at the time of its release.”

This copy of the Shaft Soundtrack has wonderful sound throughout, and that ain’t no jive talkin’! We collected a bunch of these and after putting them through the shootout process we were delighted to find out that some of the material on here can sound amazingly good on the best pressings. What earned these four sides such good grades? They’re simply richer, fuller and livelier than most. They’re also more open and transparent, with notably improved clarity, much less smear, and tighter, more note-like bass.

Find your favorite song on here, drop the needle, and see if the dramatically improved sound doesn’t bring back some special memories, and maybe even inspire you to bust a move. (more…)

Wynton Kelly Trio & Sextet – Kelly Blue

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • Wynton Kelly’s hard-to-find second album, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage OJC pressing
  • A superb pressing, with lovely richness and warmth, good space, separation between the instruments, and real immediacy throughout
  • Kelly brings in jazz greats Nat Adderley, Bobby Jaspar, and Benny Golson, as well as several of his bandmates from Miles Davis’s sextet, including Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb
  • There are some bad marks (as is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs) on “Old Clothes,” but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Kelly was renowned as an accompanist, but as he shows on a set including three of his originals and four familiar standards… A fine example of his talents.”
  • “Wynton Kelly demonstrates once again why he has been a major influence in the history of jazz piano.”

Jack Higgins was the engineer for these sessions. He recorded Chet Baker’s brilliant Chet album the same year, as well as many other albums for Riverside in New York in the 50s and 60s.

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Finally, Off to the Races

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

UPDATE 2026

Just ran into an old commentary from 2004 that I had somehow managed to save all these years. The reason I can date it that specifically is because I mention both The Disc Doctor record cleaning fluid and Hot Stampers.

We discovered the Disc Doctor record cleaning fluid in the late-90s, so when we started doing shootouts in 2004, all we had to clean records was The Disc Doctor and a VPI 16.5. By 2007 we had the Odyssey machine and were using the Prelude Record Cleaning System. The combination of those two helped to raise our level of playback a level or two.

We were finally off to the races.

The backstory to the the commentary below would have had something to do with a review I read for the new Heavy Vinyl pressing of Deja Vu from Classic Records. (For those who love the music — and that should mean pretty much everybody reading this blog — here is what a top quality Deja Vu sounds like. In a word, amazing.)

What the commentary below makes clear is that we had a pretty good handle on record pressing variations a number of years before the Hot Stamper thing really took off. It wasn’t long before finding Hot Stamper pressings would take over the business, 2007 or so, and by 2011 we were selling nothing but. They were clearly the best sounding pressings we had ever heard, and we found them using the shootout methods we’d developed over the previous ten years or so.

DATELINE 2004

As those of you who have been reading my stuff for a while know, the last thing you can do is rely on the label to tell you if a record has good sound. This same reviewer mentions how his two original Atlantic pressings have the same label, but somehow sound different (!), as if this makes no sense.

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